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Bugs on the menu

This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

What's for lunch? "Most likely it will be quiche with meal-worms and locusts. But a couple of weeks ago we had chocolates with locusts on them..." Marcel Dicke, entomologist and entomophage.

This is the culinary feast being planned by Marcel Dicke. It's a regular -- though not necessarily welcome -- accompaniment to his talks, one of which is scheduled for the end of the week. "We'll have all kinds of small snacks and different things," he adds. It's mid-February, and the 53-year-old entomologist is due to speak at

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Amsterdam Zoo, where he will try to persuade the audience that eating insects isn't just a good idea, it's inevitable. "For every human on Earth," he tells wired, "there are between 200kg and 2,000kg of insect biomass -- two tonnes of life that we often crush, avoid or poison. People think that there are a few bugs and we should just get rid of them. But there aren't a few, there are many. And we're not being bugged by them -- we really are dependent upon them.

Without insects, there's no life on Earth. "Insects are at the beginning of the food chain," says Dicke. "They serve as food for birds and small rodents. Then they also pollinate, they clean, they generate and produce wealth. In the US alone, in 2006, the unnoticed labouring of insects generated $57 billion for the country. In the same year, the Iraq war cost $80 billion. It is the silent contribution of ants, bees, grasshoppers, crickets and larvae to our economy."

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Dicke will finish his presentation as he normally does, with a food trolley being rolled on stage. The snacks laden on it change according to location ("I have suppliers in the Netherlands -- the insects we have available are meal-worms, crickets and locusts"). "In the Netherlands, the general public is used to the idea," Dicke says. "When I gave a TED talk in Oxford [July 2010], people were more reluctant." The trolley bore glazed locusts and tiny larvae that resembled ground hazelnuts. "The audience would um and ah for 15 minutes before they took a bite. In Russia, it's even worse. I'm trying to get across that these are delicacies. And anyway, you already eat 500g of insects every year." Dicke is confident that his Sunday audience will come back for seconds. "I began to realise that we were misusing a lot of our precious land," Dutch agronomist Marian Peters says. "My job was to manage state-backed local-development projects in the field of sustainable agriculture. I observed the countryside around me and thought about the best way to use these public funds. I realised I was quite good at managing resources and getting them to those who needed them the most. One day, by chance, a chicken farmer told me about this guy who worked with insects. He explained: 'He breeds locusts and larvae, and the process is so controlled that you can even eat them.' Later, I discovered that there was also a restaurant in the area, which had introduced a few edible insects on its menu. A light went off in my brain: 'Why not?' I asked myself."

Thirty percent of all land that's above sea-level and not covered in ice is used to breed livestock. The mass breeding of cattle for the production of meat is also responsible for 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions. If we add to this the interplay between cattle feed, breeding and energy consumption (fuel used first of all to transport animals to slaughterhouses and then to transport meat to processing and packaging facilities) the picture we get is one of enormous consumption of resources and production of carbon. A 2007 Japanese study estimated that the CO2 emitted to produce 1kg of beef is equivalent to the CO2 emitted by a medium-sized car travelling 250km. "When I saw how the larvae of the Tenebrio molitor, a small beetle, were being bred, I started imagining the effects that doing this on a large scale would have on the environment," Peters says. "They don't need light and their growth cycle is only six weeks long. You can breed them any time of the year. All they need to eat is organic waste. I immediately saw a new production chain transforming the food industry's waste into a precious resource."

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And, despite the fact that insects are often considered carriers of infectious diseases, the sources of the worst viruses of the past few years have been cows, pigs and poultry. Insects are, genetically speaking, far from human beings, so do not have the capacity -- as livestock does -- to mix their viruses with ours. But it's the "conversion factor" -- the relationship between feed input and edible output -- that makes the idea of breeding insects for culinary purposes sustainable and convenient. For every ten kilograms of feed, you get back one kilogram of beef, three of pork, five of chicken -- or nine of locusts. It's a miraculous optimisation of costs and benefits.

Peters and Dicke started to build the agribusiness of the future. Back in April 2010, the Dutch ministry of agriculture earmarked €1 million towards financing the world's first university research centre focusing on insects as tomorrow's dietary source.

Dicke, aided by 70 researchers from Wageningen University, which include Peters -- who, in the meantime, has united all Dutch insect breeders into a consortium called Venik -- has been working on a four-year programme that will lead to a scientific and business plan to bring insects to our tables.

The programme's first step will be to understand which kinds of food industry waste can be used as feed. The second step will be to find a way to treat proteins extracted from insects and turn them into food; the real challenge here will be scale. Third, the programme will look into the nutritional values of each species, into the quality of the proteins they produce, and into the potential presence of allergens in their meat. The starting point for this research programme at Wageningen University is the notion that 80 per cent of the world's population, knowingly or unknowingly, is already consuming insects.

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Some cultures (in Africa, Asia and Australasia) consider insects a delicacy, yet others, such as ours, reject them regardless of the fact that we eat traces of bugs in prepackaged, processed food.

There are insect fragments in canned tomatoes, in dried fruit boxes and in peanut butter. Anyone who buys organic produce ingests them in even greater quantities. The world's health-and-safety organisations constantly update their regulations defining how much organic residue is allowed in both prepackaged and fresh food. Even the US Food and Drug Administration tolerates up to five eggs and one larva of Drosophila or of any other fly. Insects, therefore, are already a part of our diet. "The truth", Peters says, "is that we've always eaten bugs."

Fossils of human faeces from the Stone Age that contain traces of ants, Acari (mites and ticks) and Coleoptera larvae (beetles, including weevils) have been found in Mexico and the US. The Greeks and the Romans ate locusts and crickets marinated in wine and glazed in honey. And, in the Old Testament book Leviticus, locusts, grasshoppers and crickets are listed among the permitted food sources. Remnants of our own entomophagous past are present in Europe, too, hidden inside some of our culinary delicacies. A good example is the casu marzu from Sardinia -- a cheese riddled with worms. And the main ingredient of E120, the extremely common red colouring agent used by the food industry, is cochineal -- obtained by grinding the carapace of the Dactylopius coccus, the so-called carmine cochineal. For years this has been the basis for the red colour of Campari. Drinkers of another alcoholic beverage -- tequila -- will be aware of the most visible bug in the western diet: the tequila worm.

If this part-scientific, part-business approach led by the Dutch has grabbed the attention of the authorities, there is a whole movement around the world supporting entomophagy as an alternative lifestyle. Among the most active are the Californians of MiniLivestock (minilivestock.org), who promote their "bug eating" and home-breeding culture with events, workshops and, of course, social dinners. In Italy, the Enrico Caffi Civic Museum of Natural Sciences in Bergamo (museoscienzebergamo.it) has been organizing entomophagous events for more than four years; gourmand dinners at which insects are served. And publications, some serious, some less so, on the subject have been increasing. Entomophagy is slowly becoming a gastronomic alternative.

It's easy to dismiss entomophagy as a marginal movement but, over the last few years, the UN has taken the issue seriously. In February 2008, its Food and Agriculture Organisation organised a round table on the subject in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The three-day workshop examined the nutritional, organisational and entrepreneurial aspects of using insects as a food source. The UN published a document based on the meeting's findings last August.

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The main consultant behind the report was Arnold van Huis, who is a colleague of Dicke at Wageningen University. A global conference on the subject is planned for 2013.

Although the centre of the movement is the Netherlands, institutions and policy-makers across the globe are taking note. To some degree, however, reaching an agreement on whether and how we'll eat insects is moot -- the real challenge is managing a deep cultural taboo. To some degree, the history of modern civilisation is an ongoing war against insects. The development of mercantile capitalism between the 15th and 17th centuries was driven by the spice trade: pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg were more precious than gold in Renaissance Europe because of their disinfecting and preserving properties. "The most important thing is getting people prepared, getting them used to the idea," Dicke tells Wired. "Because from 2020 onwards, there won't be much of a choice for us." The first step is visual: "We'll have to find a way to sell insects without actually showing them," Peters says. "The truth is that we still don't know how to cook and serve them." There are specialist websites about insect snacks (edible.com and thailandunique.com) and a few insect cookbooks, but both are more likely to provoke disgust rather than hunger. Dicke is confident that producers will eventually be able to extract proteins from insects, so people won't have to eat the whole insect: "When you are buying pork, you don't see the hind of the pig or its sty." "Our competitors are soy-based meat replacement products," explains Peters. "Although they're not as rich in proteins and they often come from GM crops, which are grown using very intensive methods that damage biodiversity, they are widely accepted. Our entrepreneurial challenge will be to develop a big enough market to be able to compete with their prices. And we'll have to sell our insects in a reassuring and attractive manner. Starting with the nutritional information on the label." There may be benefits for animal welfare, too: "Putting thousands of chickens in a building, that's not normal. But thousands of locusts in a square metre? That's what they do in nature anyway."

The first step in making entomophagy not only acceptable but also appealing was taken by a Dutch minister of agriculture, Gerda Verburg, who put insect-based courses on the menu of the ministry's canteen. Incredulous foreign visitors have already been offered a menu rich in insects bred in the Netherlands. Like so many other important things in life, innovation can begin over lunch.

This article was first published in the May 2011 issue of WIRED magazine